


Beginning Winter

by lyryk (s_k)



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-06
Updated: 2012-09-06
Packaged: 2017-11-13 16:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s_k/pseuds/lyryk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the prompt <i>Dean’s back, but Sam’s still having nightmares about Broward County.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Beginning Winter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tifaching](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tifaching/gifts).



> With many thanks and much love to my fabulous betas, [](http://marciaelena.livejournal.com/profile)[**marciaelena**](http://marciaelena.livejournal.com/) and [](http://oddishly.livejournal.com/profile)[**oddishly**](http://oddishly.livejournal.com/). Title from [this poem](http://ninaalvarez.net/2007/04/14/poem-of-the-day-32/). Written for [](http://tifaching.livejournal.com/profile)[**tifaching**](http://tifaching.livejournal.com/) and originally posted [here](http://spn-summergen.livejournal.com/140868.html) at [](http://spn-summergen.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://spn-summergen.livejournal.com/)**spn_summergen**.

A month after Broward County, Dean gets hurt. Again.

Sam’s not dealing well. Hell, he’s not dealing at all with whatever’s coming. _Highway to Hell_ has never sounded so literal before. Dean’s not suicidal anymore—he can’t put Sam through that again, not after the Trickster. But he’s beginning to hate the look of wild panic that gets into Sam’s eyes every time Dean so much as gets a scratch, hate that worse is coming and he can’t stop it, can’t protect Sam from this.

(The nights are the worst, when Sam’s at his least guarded, unable to stop the nightmares from revealing what he doesn’t speak about during the day. Most nights, Dean’s awakened by hoarse screaming. Sam thrashes in his bed like he’s being flayed, and Dean slaps him, a sharp stinging sound.)

Sam’s quiet as he stitches Dean up, dabbing gently at the wound with a whiskey-soaked cloth as Dean hisses in pain and swats his hand away.

‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’

‘Yeah.’ Sam gets up from where he’s been kneeling on the floor, disappears into the bathroom without another word.

Dean sighs and leans back against the pillows. He’s half-asleep by the time Sam comes out, faintly aware of Sam taking off his shoes and pulling up the covers up around him.

 

\--

 

Sometimes it seems strange that the Impala is as shiny as ever, as much like home as Dean remembers, a lone signifier of constancy in what’s left of his life. He wonders if Sam will drive her, or if he’ll cover her up with a tarp and leave her in some dusty warehouse. If it were him, Dean’s not entirely sure he could drive the car if Sam wasn’t in the passenger seat.

He runs a hand over the hood, and hears Sam make an impatient sound behind him.

‘It’s a car,’ Sam grits out. ‘Not some fucking horse, Dean.’

Dean grunts, doesn’t deign to reply.

Sam reaches for the door on the passenger’s side. ‘Can we just go, please?’

‘Hey, you wanna drive?’ Sam looks up, disbelieving, and Dean tosses him the keys over the roof of the car, their blurred reflections frozen for a moment on the glossy black metal before they move away.

 

\--

 

They stop for lunch at a roadside diner. It’s all so normal—the red vinyl peeling off the seats, the stagnant smell of grease in the air, the tacky larger-than-life burger on the sign outside—that for a while it seems as if this is what’s unreal, as if maybe he’s in Hell already, and this is—Sam is—an illusion.

He looks up at his brother sitting across the table, his hair too long, almost shiny in the sunlight from the window beside him. There are shadows under his eyes, hollows that tell Dean everything that Sam won’t ever put into words: the sleepless nights, the desperation, the loneliness.

Dean doesn’t know if he’d have had it in him to go through that again, lose Sam to a place that he couldn’t follow him into. Going through it once, it’s, well, what you might call a learning experience. The hours that Sam had been dead had easily been the worst of his life. And now, knowing that that’s what Sam’s faced with, Dean knows he’s enough of a coward that he’ll condemn Sam to it rather than have to face it himself, rather than let Sam be dead and try to figure out how to live without him.

 

\--

 

‘I thought we could be happy, you know?’ Sam says.

They’ve been drinking, Dean with his feet propped up on the small table between the couch and the TV, Sam on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him and his head leaning back against the arm of the couch.

Dean raises his eyebrows at the non sequitur, says nothing, lets the seconds tick past, waiting for Sam to continue, wanting to roll the silence into a ball and toss it away.

‘I mean, all this crap.’ Sam takes a large swallow from his glass. ‘Starting from Mom. Everyone who’s died, everyone I love. I thought. I thought, statistically, enough people had died. Enough that I wouldn’t have to lose. Everyone. Everyone ever.’

‘Sam.’

‘All that crap, and I still. I still thought we could be happy. We _were_ , weren’t we, Dean?’ He half-turns so that his elbow’s on the couch next to Dean’s knee.

‘Yeah, Sam. We were.’ He wishes he could have known that Sam was going somewhere with this, that there was some end to the conversation that involved him magically pulling a solution out of thin air.

‘And it’s all. So trivial now. I can’t stop thinking of the trivial things, you know?’

Dean watches Sam’s fingers clench around his glass. He puts his hand on top of Sam’s head and rubs his fingertips into Sam’s scalp until he relaxes enough that the glass probably isn’t in danger anymore. (He’d learned that early, putting Sam to sleep by stroking the crown of his head.)

‘That last day. That Wednesday. When you died and I didn’t wake up. It wasn’t even. It wasn’t even a hunt, Dean. It wasn’t a freak accident. It was a kid who killed you for your wallet.’

Sam’s talking too fast, too fast for Dean’s alcohol-slowed brain to keep up with him. ‘At least we know that’s not what’s gonna happen this time,’ Dean says with a dry laugh, imagining hellhound-claws, pieces of him scattered around for Sam to pick up and burn.

‘Fuck you,’ Sam says, soft and angry, and Dean doesn’t know when he went from being a hurt little boy to Kojak mode again. He pulls away from Dean’s hand, the soft strands of hair slipping through Dean’s fingers before he can tighten them. ‘I need some air.’ He picks up his jacket and is gone, the door clicking shut behind him.

Dean lies awake for a long time, the old air conditioner growling softly in the dark, chilling the air around him like an artificial winter. They both know that as long as Dean’s around, Sam will always be the little brother. Maybe later, he’ll turn into someone else, someone Dean won’t know, will never have met.

 

\--

 

‘So, what d’you think?’ Dean pushes the sheet of paper across the table. Takes another sip of his coffee (Sam had brought it, contrite, while he was in the shower), doesn’t say _where were you last night_ or _I’m sorry I didn’t wait up_ or _I know you’re still looking, I know you won’t stop till it’s over_ or _oh god, Sammy, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry_ , watches Sam flip the paper around to look at it.

‘It’s a pentagram. So?’

‘It’s an anti-possession charm.’

Sam looks like he’s barely restraining himself from rolling his eyes. ‘Dean. I know. So?’

‘So, I thought we could get that done. On us.’

Sam brightens visibly. ‘Like tattoos, you mean?’

‘Yeah, like tattoos.’ (He likes making Sam happy, like that Fourth of July in that field; he can’t remember now where it was. All he’d known of independence then had been defying Dad to make Sam happy. Sam had had other ideas about freedom, running away at Flagstaff and leaving nothing of himself behind, not even a book or a sock. Dad hadn’t even been there at the time, so it must have been Dean who drove Sam away. He wishes he knew how he’d done that. He’d like to do it again now, chase Sam away so he doesn’t have to be there when Dean’s time runs out.)

‘What’re we waiting for?’ Sam leaps to his feet, tosses Dean’s jacket at him.

 

\--

 

‘I don’t know about this place.’ Dean looks up at the dubious neon sign that hangs askew, the half-pornographic sketches that grace the grimy window display.

‘Don’t be a wuss, Dean. I thought this would be right up your alley.’ Sam smirks at a tattoo of a mermaid on a rock, seaweed artfully entangled over her chest.

Dean raises his eyebrows at him. ‘Dude, I have standards. Especially when someone’s going to be sticking needles in me.’

‘Come on, it’ll be fun.’ Sam tugs on his sleeve, half-dragging him into the shop.

It _is_ fun, in a way. For once they aren’t inventing characters; they aren’t Agent Rock Star and his partner, just two guys getting tattoos, and maybe that’s why Dean feels a little vulnerable. Usually he slides easily into each fiction, more at ease with the people they invent than he is with being himself. Sam, more elaborate in his thinking, is less able to fit into his characters, barely getting into a skin before he has to shed it, and learn to inhabit a new one.

Dean has a sneaking suspicion that Sam constructs elaborate histories for each of his characters; his English teachers at school had consistently told him that he should consider being a writer. Sam’s mind, Dean knows, is a scary place full of details, where nothing is black-and-white and everything must be intricate in order to exist. He smiles at the thought, and gives Sam a cheesy grin just for equilibrium’s sake; appearing cut-and-dry is his only defence against Sam’s sheer involvedness, the way he drowns in things, throws himself into them.

The place smells musty in a comforting sort of way, the lights dull enough not to hurt his eyes as he and Sam lie back on identical metal tables. Sharp pain prickles through his skin, and Sam’s hand closes around his wrist. He’s saying something that Dean won’t be able to recall later, like a thought that enters his mind just before sleep takes over, only to be lost in the tides of darkness.

Dean keeps his eyes closed as the needle pierces his skin, listening to the pattering of the rain on the awning outside, imagining the way the water would be making little rivulets on the windows of the Impala, parked outside. It’s a familiar sort of rain, a noisy, heavy shower that takes you by surprise and dies down as suddenly as it begins. (Sam used to love those as a kid, would shriek in delight and stomp through the puddles, drenching them both. Those were among the times it felt like a good thing that they had no parents breathing down their backs, telling them to get inside and change their clothes. Later, wrapped in a thick blanket, Sam would sit outside with his bare feet in a large puddle, his small toes curling just under the translucent water.)

He turns his head on the table to see Sam looking at him, eyes bright and breath rapid with the rush of adrenaline. ‘Okay?’ Dean asks.

‘Oh yeah.’ Sam grins back, and for just a moment it’s as if he’s a little boy again, exhilarated by the little things.

 

\--

 

They walk back to the car in companionable silence, gauze bandages on their chests. There are raindrops clinging to the telephone lines above their heads, making them glitter. There are tiny streams of rain on the windshield of the Impala, just as Dean had pictured them, almost as if he’d thought them into existence. He thinks of his cassettes in the car, the extra onions he always orders. All the intricate, unimportant details that make him Dean.

 

\--

 

And then Lilith is there, and there isn’t time to register much at all except for the tears on Sam’s face and the sound of his screams and the realization that this isn’t a nightmare that he can wake Sam from. His amulet bounces against his chest as the hellhounds knock him on to his back: a small, inanimate piece of metal, no protection at all, but he takes comfort from it nonetheless. Blood is splashing on to it, sangria-red, pain blooming from beneath his torn skin and spilling up like a fountain, and the smallness of things impresses itself on him again.

 

\--

 

Hell is colder than he’d imagined it would be, an unchanging winter. When it isn’t making him scream, Hell takes Dean through the landscapes of his own worst memories: Lawrence, Flagstaff, Cold Oak.

Hell is a stage where Dean learns to perform. It takes decades, but he finally believes that this was what he was destined to become. Sometimes his victims look like people he thinks he should know. Sometimes they look like Sam: not Sam as Dean had left him, but Sam as a skinny adolescent, still too short for his age, vulnerable. A snap of Dean’s wrist can break his neck.

Dean steps away for a moment, closes his eyes, tries to recall how the fireworks had looked that night, in the open field they’d all but burned down. There’s nothing but black in the hollows behind his eyes, not even the echo of a memory left, none of the happiness that had danced in Sam’s eyes, not one of those sparks that had lit up the sky.

He opens his eyes and turns back to the boy on the rack. ‘Dean,’ the boy says, his voice familiar, beloved. It’s the most terrifying sound Dean’s ever heard.

-end-


End file.
